Manor Lords Early Access Review

ign.com:

Gazing out across my lively medieval burgh in Manor Lords, I see great promise. The detailed buildings, villagers, and landscapes are always pleasant to look upon. The complex, rewarding, if not necessarily precision-balanced economy is entertaining and intuitive to interact with. And the war cries of my homegrown militia, off to bash some bandits, remind me that each bloody clash is costing someone a son or a husband. But for all its potential, Manor Lords is an extremely Early Access-feeling Early Access game at this point. Sometimes, it even seems more like a proof of concept than a finished product.

There is fun to be had in this initial release of Manor Lords. The freedom to lay out bustling streets and market squares, putting villagers to work on sprawling farms and in smoky backyard workshops, is a joyful and generally well-paced experience. The road tool is a little fiddly for my liking, but laying out custom lots and snapping everything together dynamically at the corners makes it easy to craft settlements that look and feel cohesive and realistic.

One of my favorite little touches is the addition of backyard workshops, which let you move commerce into the places where people actually live. That's much more accurate to the era Manor Lords is trying to capture than having massive commercial buildings everyone works at. I get this cozy, familiar feeling when I zoom in and can see that this is where the town blacksmith lives. And just across the way, Herman and Agnes brew beer for the lively tavern down the road.

Almost everything about the sound design and visual presentation is exceptional. Rainstorms patter and boom, leaving roads slick and strewn with puddles. Winter blankets everything in a sparkling frost. The animations for something as simple as getting water from a well are grounded and meticulously detailed in a way that always rewards me for zooming in.

There's even a neat feature that lets you run around as a character in your own town, but… not